6 comments:

We still seem to be in the thick of things -- thanks more to a weak AL east than the Yankees themselves. With our pitching in surprisingly good form (we probably lost about six games in the last two weeks our pitchers deserved to win), we can look forward to maybe at least one of our starters (Wang, Hughes, Kennedy) coming back and doing well. I assume we'll stumble into the post-season but certainly don't have the feeling we'll get to the World Series or even dserve to do so. And Jeter had one of his weakest first halves in a long time -- which means I can look forward to him over-producing in the second half.

Second, it sounds like Hughes will not make it back to the majors this year to save him from becoming a free agent a year earlier.

And lastly, just because Jeter has underperformed until now does not mean that he will overperform the rest of the way. He is statistically likely to perform at his career average the rest of the way and end up with a sub-par year by his standards. For him to overperform equal to his first-half underperformance is just as likely a scenario as Jeter continuing to underperform the rest of the year. And due to his age, I would say that isn't even true since at this point in his career he would be more inclined to underperform relative to his career averages than match them.

They're going to keep a potentially crucial arm away from the home stretch because of contract years? can't imagine they'd be that short-sighted. Where did you read that about Hughes?

As for Jeter, obviously I'm HOPING he'll over-perform in the second half. And really, he's basically on target to have the typical numbers in fielding and batting that he always has. I know we're six games into the second half, but for ease of comparison, let's just double the numbers he has now. More to come.

Not looking to argue about Jeter's stats because (1) its meaningless, (2) he transcends them, if that's even possible, and (3) I'm biased into HOPING he picks it up...but just wanted to point out that doubling his first half numbers doesn't really work considering the Yanks have played 95 games, which leaves just 67 remaining.